To Market, to Market - Competitive Tendering and the Purchase of service in the Community Sector

Over the past decade the nature and role of non”government, or ‘community based’,organisations in the Australian welfare sector has been subjected to intensescrutiny and change. For many years, especially since the 1970s, government agencies (especially State government) supported voluntary groups ” organised at a range of organisational and geographic scales ” to conduct a variety of activitiesand to provide services which were seen as more appropriately delivered outsidethe framework of government bureaucracy. A new emphasis placed onaccountability in government and the rise to prominence of principles known as‘New Public Management’, has seen many of the practices which characterised thisrelationship radically reformed and many new ones introduced. A new languagehas emerged amongst community workers to describe and define the practiceswhich increasingly characterise the relationship between government and non”government agencies in this field: terms such as ‘competitive tendering’, ‘servicespecifications’ and ‘purchase of service contracts’ have become part and parcel of the daily discourse of community organisations. In NSW, the various government agencies involved with human services have taken somewhat different approachesand proceeded at a different pace in different programs. However, broadly viewedacross the sector, government agencies have moved to position themselves less asresponding to needs identified by local communities, and more as purchasers of pre”defined services. Community organisations have thus become sellers, or‘vendors’, of services, and in many cases are required to ‘compete’ with each other for a share of ‘the market’.